An American Architectural Epoch Locks Its Doors

No doubt many saw the recent opening of Dallas’s imposing new performing arts center as a welcome sign of civic confidence during hard times. But it also signaled a closing.

A dynamic moment in American architecture — the explosion of art museums, concert halls and performing arts centers that transformed cities across the country over the last decade — is officially over. The money has dried up, and who knows when there will be a similar boom.

Some are thrilled. For years critics have railed against these cultural complexes as pointlessly grandiose expressions of vanity — a poisonous brew of architectural egotism and excessive wealth that was destroying America’s urban centers. Why all the fancy forms, they argued? Wouldn’t the money be better spent on something more valuable, like schoolbooks?

Yet as the dust settles on the last of these projects, what begins to emerge is a more complex image of America’s cultural values at the birth of a new century. The formal dazzle masks a deeper struggle by cities and architects to create accessible public space in an age of shrinking government revenue and privatization. At their most ambitious, they are an effort to rethink the two great urban planning movements that gave shape to the civic and cultural identity of the American city.

The more influential of these was the City Beautiful Movement in the late 19th century. Modeled after the Beaux-Arts grandiosity of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the movement was an expression of a newly confident, ascendant America — a country of national monopolies and sprawling rail networks. The homogeneity of the architecture, with its classical facades typically arranged around formal parks, reflected the desire to create a symbolic language of national unity after the Civil War. Emulated in cities like Washington, Cleveland, Denver and Detroit, the movement gave the country its first uniform vision of city planning.

The urge returned during the cold war in New York’s Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Los Angeles Music Center. These sprawling cultural complexes, cut off from their surrounding neighborhoods, not only reflected tabula rasa planning orthodoxies of their time, but all of them used a mix of modern and imperial styles and themes to portray a progressive vision of America rooted in classical ideals.

I suspect that many of those who criticize the eclecticism of recent years miss the confidence the two earlier eras conveyed. Most likely, they liked aspects of their homogeneity, too. The problem with freedom, after all, is that it allows for horrifying imaginative failures as well as works of stunning genius. When artists fail, you can ignore their work. When architects fail, you walk by their buildings every morning on your way for coffee shaking your fist. (The Milwaukee and Denver art museums come to mind.)

Yet this period produced powerful efforts to create a new model for the post-cold-war American city. The most obvious of these is Chicago’s Millennium Park, a somewhat traditional arrangement of cultural buildings and sprawling lawns built on top of a derelict rail yard. Completed in 2004, the park is mobbed with office workers and tourists on an average weekday. It feels as if it has been part of the city’s life for decades.

Its uncommon power, though, stems from the symbiotic relationship between opposing architectural visions: the rambunctious steel forms of Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion and Renzo Piano’s glass-and-steel addition to the Art Institute of Chicago. The two — one a vision of riotous emotions, the other of quiet serenity — square off directly across from each other. And they lock the park into a larger urban composition of mismatched late-19th-century and early-20th-century office buildings and 1980s towers.

Photo

CLASSICAL BEGINNINGS A move to create a national cultural identity began with City Beautiful, top. ECLECTIC ENDINGS An epoch of millennial architecture, coming to a close, rejected homogeneity.
Credit
Top, Chicago History Museum, via Associated Press (World's Fair 1893, Chicago); J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times (Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles)

A cultural district in Miami — the only one still in the planning stages that looks likely to move ahead since it was financed years ago — will take a similarly eclectic approach. The project will stand on a 30-acre landfill framed by Biscayne Bay and what was once the city’s main commercial boulevard. A strip of undulating dunes, which block the view from the boulevard and made the area a hot spot for crime in the 1970s and 1980s, will be removed. New science and art museums are to be tucked alongside the park. As in Chicago, the buildings will present contrasting architectural styles that confront each other across a plaza. The science museum, by Grimshaw Architects, is all curves; Herzog & de Meuron’s cheekier art museum, raised up on a concrete plinth, resembles a cold-war-era performing arts center that has been surgically reconstructed and then swallowed up by the surrounding park.

Both the Chicago and Miami developments reflect the evolution of architectural thought at the beginning of the current millennium. Both favor heterogeneity over conformity; both seek to express the clash of values that define a historic city rather than suppress it. At the same time, they are carefully interwoven with the urban fabric that surrounds them.

But their success has as much to do with context and scale as with the quality of the architecture. Millennium Park and the Miami cultural district abut relatively healthy, historically rich urban districts. And neither is bigger than a few city blocks.

When an arts district flounders, the causes are often found in the social history of its site. Particularly in the aftermath of the highway construction and slum clearance strategies that reached their height in the Eisenhower era, the question has been not only how to create vibrant public spaces but how to repair social, racial and economic scars that are decades old.

This was especially true in Dallas, where the freeways that border the arts district site to the north and east were built with money partly from the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. In a pattern repeated across America, these projects were bulldozed through thriving African-American and Latino communities, cutting them off from the city center. By the time planners unveiled the first proposals to build a new arts district, in the 1970s, much of the site had deteriorated into a wasteland of empty lots, industrial buildings and corner bars. Planners envisioned a necklace of cultural institutions along a 68-acre site that extends east from the Museum of Art along a tree-lined street.

The results could have been worse. The enormous steel canopy of Norman Foster’s opera house has a pleasant, almost affectionate relationship with the low Cubist forms of Brad Cloepfil’s performing and visual arts high school next door. Rem Koolhaas’s and Joshua Prince-Ramus’s cool and somber aluminum-clad theater tower across the street, by contrast, is an aggressive rejection of the visual noise that many have come to expect when a star architect is hired to design a cultural building. What’s more, the new buildings sit comfortably alongside older structures like I.M. Pei’s concert hall and Edward Larrabee Barnes’s art museum, extending the conversation across generations as well as contrasting architectural philosophies.

What the planners could not easily overcome, however, was the scale of destruction, and the resistance many felt toward breaking down old barriers. Nearly 30 years after the plan was unveiled, most of the commercial lots remain empty. And the divisions that continue to separate this enclave of high culture from the nearby communities remain deep.

No project better illustrates these tensions than Los Angeles’ downtown arts district, which was conceived in the 1950s as an elite cultural citadel fortified against the surrounding Latino neighborhoods. To build it, civic leaders approved the bulldozing of a sprawling, decayed residential neighborhood of two-story Victorian houses. The Music Center, completed in the 1960s, was isolated on a concrete base in the style of Lincoln Center. The Harbor Freeway, partly built around the same time, cut the site off from the city to the west. The area’s isolation was further reinforced in the 1980s with the construction of sterile corporate towers and plazas, which formed a barrier against the Latino communities that occupied the old historic corridor nearby.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, completed six years ago, was the first sincere effort to reverse this trend. Frank Gehry went to great pains to fuse his building with the city around it. The ribbons of shiny stainless steel that envelop the structure lift up seductively along Grand Avenue to draw passersby into the lobby. Just above, the facade swells out to echo the curves of the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion next door, a gesture that gives the old structure sudden, unexpected grace.

But if Mr. Gehry’s creation has brought instant vitality to the street, it also demonstrates architecture’s limits as an agent for social healing. Even as the building was rising, Mr. Gehry and a choir of other voices were lobbying hard to break down the physical barriers that isolated the avenue from the rest of downtown. Many of the solutions were obvious. Mr. Gehry produced an elegant design to bring the Music Center’s plaza down to the level of the avenue. Civic leaders envisioned a park that would extend east from the base of the Music Center down to City Hall, linking the arts district to downtown’s civic core. So far these proposals have come to naught, and just as in Dallas, vast lots bulldozed decades ago remain undeveloped.

The failures in Dallas and Los Angeles, in the end, have less to do with too much creative freedom, the quality of the buildings and the master plan, or even the basic concept of an arts district, than with scale and context. They reflect the long battle between those who want to tear down old barriers and those who simply want to replace them with new ones. Solving that conflict will be left to a future epoch.

A version of this article appears in print on October 25, 2009, on Page WK1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Epoch Locks Its Doors. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe